For the time being, think of yourself as a commander who is leading a large contingent of soldiers in the battlefield. No doubt, you are gutsy, hard-boiled, and have that killer instinct to mince your opponent. But hey, do you have the right intelligence about where your enemy excels or what is their Achilles heel? If not, then you are unfit for the battle. And, the best tactic left before you is to beat a hasty retreat or die. Battles can only be won when you analyze every bit of information about the enemy and then strategize accordingly. Now, draw a parallel between this and your digital-heavy business. Here also, you will have to gain insights into the quirks and foibles of the traffic that comes to your digital properties: desktop website, mobile website, or mobile application. However, it’s not as easy as it sounds; you need a full-blown digital analytics setup to analyze the data captured from various data points.

In case you are just cutting your teeth on digital analytics, you may get intimidated by the complexities involved. Fear not, soon your body will release enough endorphins to ease the tension as we will provide you with top 5 hacks to simplify your digital analytics. After that, we will introduce you to some popular web, mobile, and social analytics tools. So, let’s raise the curtain!

Set your broad goals

To get off to a flying start in digital analytics, you have to establish your goals first. In other words, you must be 100% clear on what you want to achieve. It could be delivering enhanced customer satisfaction, boosting conversions across all the touch-points, or anything else. Goals are important because they will help you to figure out the metrics you will work with.

Don’t overburden yourself with a vast number of metrics

Remember the saying “too many cooks spoil the soup.” More often than not, whenever too many people try to participate in an activity simultaneously, they mess things up. Likewise, by having an abundance of metrics you lose focus and your digital analytics efforts become counterproductive. Never attempt to monitor more metrics than is necessary. Stick to the ones that are the most relevant to your goals. For instance, you can limit yourself to page views or opt-in rate while you run a lead generation website.

Don’t use multiple tools from the get-go

Do yourself a big favor; embark on your digital analytics journey with a single tool. If you deploy more than one, you will probably have to cope with a steep learning curve. This may drive you up the wall and in the end, you will regret the sheer waste of time.

Lean on tools that visualize data

There may be some geeks who live and breathe raw figures but not all have the stomach to do so. It’s far better to opt for a tool that visualizes data in a snackable form.

Frequency of checking analytics reports

You are definitely not someone to believe that the metrics you are tracking will show significant improvement on a daily basis. That’s just plain absurd! So keep calm and study your reports at reasonable intervals. Don’t get in a mad rush to change outcomes every other day.

Okay, you have known the secret sauce to devise an easy-to-grasp digital analytics strategy that actually works. Now, as we have said earlier, you will meet a handful of widely used analytics tools. But, keep in mind that we are not recommending one over the other. We will start with the web analytics department and then move on to mobile and social. These tools are all free and quite sufficient to begin with and then if you want to move forward with advanced analytics, you can subscribe to the premium versions:

As the name suggests, this one is from the search giant itself. So, you can rest assured that the free service offers lots of cool features. By the way, it also has two more flavors: Google Analytics Premium and Google Analytics for Mobile Apps. This is a tool specially designed for small business owners who have little to nil experience of the digital analytics world. With it you can find the geographical regions from where your traffic is generating, see your bounce rates, determine demographics, understand keywords that attract the biggest proportion of visitors, and so on. On the whole, it’s a solid tool to measure your website data.

Clicky is another great service that is in direct competition with Google Analytics. The best part of Clicky is that from top to bottom it’s real-time. You can put Clicky into action on only one website without paying a dime. Also, the number of page views is restricted to 3000 per day. Beyond that, you have to choose from the paid plans: Pro, Pro Plus, Pro Platinum, and Custom.

Mixpanel is a highly advanced mobile analytics tool that supports both the two main mobile platforms: Android and iOS. Perhaps, the greatest strength of Mixpanel is that it allows users to frame custom queries even if they are absolutely ignorant about SQL. The tool is very useful for event and funnel tracking. It’s free for up to 25,000 data points. If you want more, you can use the Startup version (500,000 data points) that costs $150 per month.

This app analytics tool packs a set of interesting features such as in-app messaging, push-messaging, and lifetime value tracking under its hood. Localytics is free as long as the number of your monthly active users remains under 10,000. It runs on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, and HTML5.

Hootsuite is a familiar name in the realm of social media tools. It empowers you to manage and track accounts on over 35 social platforms via a powerful dashboard. From scheduling posts to keeping an eye on mentions to conveying how campaigns have fared, Hootsuite makes your social presence more meaningful. For individual use, the tool is free of charge. Pro and Enterprise plans are also available.

To conclude

As going digital is the inevitable today, you have to put your best foot forward to grow on the digital channels. However, the possibility of making it happen depends on an accurate interpretation of data obtained from those channels. So, make a robust game plan by taking into account what has been stated above and what your particular situation demands. In the beginning, you do not need to spend a lot of money to get started with digital analytics. Try our suggestions and find success free of cost!